Since this laptop has only 5 minutes battery life, power failure is an irritation as the power lead also tends to fall out from time to time. So I figured out how to write a script to run every 30 seconds to monitor the power and pop up a dialog warning of power failure, before the battery gives up. This has saved me on several occasions.

yes I did that too as there is no built in ability it seems.

Quote:

How do I go about that mike? I'm always afraid when I go messing with making partitions.

If there is a spare usb socket and a spare usb format it as swap and plug it in before booting and see if it gets detected..

now I'm hyjacking thee thread and will get carted off by moderators in white coats whilst screaming I love vista and want bill's babies...

The box was a pass-along, from the mother of a friend who had upgraded to a faster machine and wanted to see it go to a good home. As delivered from Fujitsu, it had a 30GB Toshiba drive and Win XP Pro SP2. She commented it was "slow slow slow" Running XP Pro in 256MB of RAM made that no surprise. Win 2K Pro runs a little better in 256MB,. but takes 7.5 to 8 minutes to boot.

Xubuntu runs but is extremely sluggish.

Puppy 4.31 is installed on an ext4 file system, in a full install with separate 512mb swap partition. Puppy itself is fairly sprightly, but third party apps like Firefox 3.6 and Open Office 3.2 are slow loading.

Pretty much everything works. Puppy drives the screen through Xorg, and handles the 1280x768 display that is the best the video will do. (The Windows ATI driver does 1600x1200, but as a 1280x768 window panning over a 1600x1200 virtual screen. I'm just as happy Puppy doesn't support that...)

Net access is normally via CAT5 cable to a port on my router, but Puppy detects my wireless card. It took a bit of fiddling to get it to see my network: the default choices in the Network Wizard didn't see it. Once I told it to look for a broadcast SSID, it saw my router.

Still can't connect via wifi at home, however: Puppy seems to support WEP and WPA, but not WPA2. since I normally connect via cable at home, I don't really care.

The biggest issue with the box is arthritic disk I/O, resulting in slow loading of large programs. I could theoretically up the RAM to 384MB (the max Fujitsu says it will take) and swap in a faster HD, but this is mostly an experiment to see what I can wring out of ancient hardware, and I'm disinclined to spend money on it.

Puppy is a fairly good fit for the low end hardware, and I wasn't expecting a lot, so I'm reasonably happy.
______
Dennis

I installed puppy 4.3.1 from live cd on this older laptop. it has (i think) 512 mb ram 800mhz processor w dvd/cd drive. I couldnt get past grub on dvd so i burned a live cd and got it up n running. When i tried to install to hdd it was getting hung with grub something about the way the drive was formatted , if i recall. so after hunting the forums i found the auto installl frugal script that was posted and it worked perfectly. very quick and easy install. I wish the live cd would offer that script it would save MUCH time and HEADACHES. Overall it seems to work very well . I only wanted it for the wife to use for browsing and email on the counter (wired ethernet) .

One of the reasons for keeping Windows is that this computer has a built-in analog modem that lets me use standard phone lines when necessary. Never got it to work under Puppy.
BS

Puppy should work with most/all built-in laptop modems. However, 4.3.1-k2.6.30.5 contains an erroneous version of the driver for many (SmartLink) such modems. The k2.6.25.16 version of 4.3.1 contains the correct driver. If you have either the 2.6.25.16 or 2.6.21.. iso, from it copy /lib/modules/all-firmware/slmodem to the same place in 4.3.1-k2.6.30.5.

If the modem is detected as ttySHSF0 but that does not work, there is a way to fix that (but I need particulars) or you can wait for my imminent new modem fix pack, due shortly in the 4.3.1 bugs thread.
Richard

Hi, mikeb mentioned he is using an HP laptop where he was able to configure Puppy to drive his external monitor.

i would like to know what steps I should do to replicate that.

i am using an old Dell Inspiron B120 laptop running on Puppy 431 via a USB memory card.

I use Xorg and could not get the external monitor to display an extended desktop, like you can in windows. Right no, my external monitor just displays the same desktop displayed on my laptop's monitor.

Right no, my external monitor just displays the same desktop displayed on my laptop's monitor.

That's what I had....you need to edit or obtain a /etc/X11/xorg.conf to do what you want and google is the place to look. I was lucky as the suse driver and its xorg.conf enable the external screen as puppy only supported vesa.

I'm using a two and a half year old Dell Inspiron 1501 that I bought cheap a couple of months ago.Part of the deal was that I had to wipe the hard drive. After playing with an XP reinstall that resulted in a cranky Window$ that acted rather like an old man in a nursing home who had been awakened by the nurse so he can take his sleeping pill. Bad move on M$s part as I had been wanting to try a full install of Puppy for awhile now.

So I did.

Puppy 4.31 and Grub installed with no problem. After that I Installed Ubuntu 9.10 in a dual boot.

Etho works fine however I've only tried the wifi twice once successfully on an unsecured network and once unsuccessfully on a public library network. I haven't taken the time yet to sort that out but I suspect operator head space and timing. Interestingly enough Ubuntu wouldn't recognize the wireless until a driver was installed but Puppy found it right off.

Good thread, CatDude. I like playing with used equipment and this info will come in handy evaluating potential acquisitions in the future.

My thanks go to you and everyone else, for taking the time to contribute.

I am now looking to purchase a laptop myself, but i have so many questions, i don't know where to start
for example:

1. Are there any particular brands and/or models that are best avoided ?
2. Are there any particular brands and/or models that are highly recommended ?
3. When it comes to CPU's, which are the best to go for AMD's or Intel's ?
4. What about graphics cards, which are least likely to be a problem (driver wise) ?

First off: Puppy Linux is the best Linux distribution available...period.

My second choice is PC Linux OS, but that's another subject.

I've been fooling around with Puppy for the last 2 or 3 upgrades but the current Puppy did the trick. All the previous versions were nearly impossible to connect wirelessly on any of my old laptops.

When 4.3.1 came out...perfection. That was exciting.

I have two old Toshibas and one Gateway, all of which came with Windows XP. When Puppy Linux 4.3.1 came out I could connect wirelessly and that was the final push that made me recommend it to everyone who showed any kind of interest.

The Toshibas are models 2435 with a 2.4 Intel processor and L25 S1216 which has a 1.6 Celeron. The Gateway is a barebones MX3225 with a 1.5 Celeron.

All 3 laptops work seamlessly with Puppy. And the speed is fantastic. I save my configuration to the hard drives and that makes it easy to boot up and use Puppy.

There have been issues with the soundcards working especially on the Gateway which I'm looking into now.

I also tried doing the USB pendrive Puppy and it only worked on the Gateway which is the newer machine (about 3 years old) and allows for a USB boot in the bios. But my configurations changed with Puppy on the USB drive and I couldn't connect wirelessly. Which was a disappointment. So I boot up with a mini cd in the optical drive instead

If anyone finds this interesting I can submit more technical detail in a future post. I'm composing this on my Gateway currently.

An interesting thing, too, for me with Puppy. My Gateway has a built-in wifi via Realtek. This wifi regularly has disconnects when I boot up under Windows XP and have taken to using a pcmcia Linksys card which is more stable most of the time.

Under Puppy, I connect regularly with the Realtek wifi and have left the Gateway on for a whole day without getting disconnected once. For me, that's impressive.

I am sure that there are plenty of knowledgeable and more experienced folks on this forum that might disagree with me, but I am kinda' fond of the 3~5 year old business-class Dell notebooks. Just make sure the BIOS allows for booting from USB. They aren't the lightest (best used as a desktop replacement) but I've seen technicians take them apart -- everything is accessible and they seem to last. Had an old Acer laptop for awhile which was a nightmare to disassemble and assemble. A nearby compatriot has a 14" Dell D610 Centrino that I would love to own if he were willing to sell it (he's not).

The ability to install around 2GB of RAM will allow you to run any Linux distro currently available. You will not be buying the laptop with the RAM already installed, of course (too expensive that way).

If you are looking for something that travels well, I think others are better qualified than I am to answer. For my own travels, I have a (now discontinued) Dell netbook (some of the newer Dell netbooks are not so easily upgradeable as mine is).

Although I don't know squat about comparing CPU's or computer brands that I have not owned, scour these forums for those hard-to-load graphics cards. Those are what I would be tempted to avoid. Intel graphics have almost always worked well for me with Linux; some of the Intel wireless drivers are typically compiled into the Linux kernels by default.

Most importantly, Google for a trustworthy review of the kit before you pay your hard-earned money. Some of the older Dells, as an example, had problems with too much heat. I think Dell was even sued at one point for CPU issues. Google is our friend!

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